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 The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Underview
Original appearance:Albedo one issue 8, 1995
Stephen Baxter is a writer who is slowly but surely building himself a reputation as one of the more thoughtful and intelligent authors working in the science fiction field. His books have always been chock-a-block with the traditional virtues of hard SF and as he holds a Ph.D in mathematics it is not surprising that his work tends to reflect the ideals of the hard sciences rather than the plethora of new writes mining the depths of the social sciences. Me, I'm not a very scientific guy, so if you tell me that a doohickey out accelerates a quantum particle by a factor of five then I'm going to take it as gospel. Of course if you begin to explain the theory behind this piece of jargon I'm likely to fall asleep. So when it comes to scientific veracity I'm not much of a judge. So from my perspective all I can say is that Baxter has always seemed like he knew what he was talking about to me. If his science is bullshit, it's convincing to the uninitiated.
Given his background, and the fact that he's English, it's not surprising that he has become one of the many writers contributing work to the celebration of the centenary of the publication of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. I name him as one of many, but given the sheer size of that contribution, a 450 plus words novel, he must really be seen as the prime literary mover.
The book he has produced is a sequel to Wells' original and entitled THE TIME SHIPS. It takes up the story of Wells' time traveller on his return to the his home time of 1891 and his subsequent journeyings to the very end as well as the very beginnings of time.
This is not a pastiche, it is, in every sense of the word, an homage. Stephen Baxter has attempted to write the sequel Wells himself would have written had his publishers been afflicted with the same marketing realities as we experience in the nineties.. He has written the novel in the style of Wells, has used Wells' main character to carry the narrative and has presented it very much in the 'sense of wonder' style of the original and works contemporary with it, most notably William Hope Hodgson's House on the Borderlands. TIME SHIPS is very much an extrapolation of a novel about time which Wells might have written.
The un-named central character discovers that his travels through time have created a new time line in which the Morlocks and Eloi failed to evolve into the forms in which he discovered them originally. Instead, he discovers a world - indeed, a solar system - dominated completely by the morlocks in which they have engulfed the sun in a sphere in order to fully utilise its potential as an enemy source. This, like all the ideas propounded in the novel, is a feat of engineering almost unimaginable to Baxter's (Wells'?) protagonist and truly cosmic in its scope.
He escapes from this time accompanied by the morlock who had been assigned to look after him. Together, they quickly discover that every trip through time creates new time lines and indeed that others have worked on time travel, developing huge time travelling war machines, which attempt the ultimate pre-emptive strikes, resulting in a nuclear battle in prehistory.
By Wells' Victorian standards this is an immense work of imagination and as a tribute to a great novelist and one of the formative novels of science fiction as a genre, it succeeds admirably. Unfortunately, TIME SHIPS is a novel of and for the 1990's and must therefore be judged by the standards of the times. On that level, purely and simply as a novel - no homage, no centenary baggage - it must be judged somewhat of a failure. For me, the characters failed totally to engage me in their needs and desires. In fact, there was little in the way of convincing needs and desires or emotions, human or otherwise, in the novel. The characters were indeed Victorian, but one dimensional Victorian. Only in the short exploration of the central character's early life in a parallel time line and the resultant war in pre-history was there anything to engage the reader on an emotional level.
If you are happy reading a novel that could easily have been written at the end of the last century and could well be read as a genuine sequel to The Time Machine, in form, content and style, then The Time Ships is for you. But if like me you like your fiction to be about people rather than things, feelings rather than wonderful inventions and marvellous sights, this might be a novel you will pass up. The main strength of Baxter's novel is, for me, also its main problem - this is a Victorian novel published in 1995. The novel has come a long way in the interim. So has science fiction.
Traces by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Brendan Ryder
Original appearance:Albedo one issue 17, Autumn 1998
This latest collection of short stories by acclaimed hard sf writer Stephen Baxter contains 21 short pieces which have for the most part, been published in Interzone between 1988 and 1996. For anyone familiar with Baxter's writing the collection may be a temptation, especially if the reader doesn't get Interzone every month. The stories are typical hard sf, Baxter style, with lots of sensawonda.
The opening and title story, Traces, involves two explorers, one a minister in the Holistic Church whose beliefs are based on the anthropic principle (that the universe has a grand design). On a mission to the Oort cloud the two find evidence of extraterrestrial life on one of the comets, a discovery which causes much anguish to the Minister.
Two stories feature an alternate history where Germany won the Second World War. No Longer Touch The Earth involves Hermann Göring and an attempt to fly to the South Pole, while Mittelwelt has a new German sub-orbital aircraft on its test flight when war is declared between Germany and Japan.
One of Baxter's classic sf ideas is Anti-Ice, a form of ice which, when combined with ordinary matter produces great power - anti matter by any other name. A Journey to the King Planet is a steampunk type tale featuring a space liner powered by anti-ice travelling to Mars and hi-jacked.
When Baxter tries to give the characters some depth he usually fails, giving us stereotypes whose sole purpose is to move the story along. But the science and ideas are good and most of the stories left me wanting more.
The collection is a must for Baxter and hard sf fans. If you're unsure, wait for the paperback.
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